The General Psychology Of Tennis (Part 1)

Tennis psychology is only understanding the workings of your opponent’s mind, and gauging the effect of your own game on his/her mental viewpoint and also understanding the mental effects resulting from the various external causes on your own mind.

However, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own psychology. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing happening under various circumstances. This is because you react differently in different moods and under different circumstances.

You have to understand the effect on your game of the ensuing annoyance, joy, bewilderment, or whatever other form your reaction is. Does it improve your prowess? If so, try for it, but never give it to your opponent. Does it deprive you of concentration? If so, either remove the reason, but if that isn’t possible, try to ignore it.

Once you have accurately judged your own reaction to circumstances, study your opponents in order to decide their characters. Like characters react similarly, and you can judge men of your own sort by yourself. Different temperaments you must seek to compare with people whose reactions you know.

A person who can control his/her own mental processes has an excellent chance of reading those of someone else for the mind works along definite lines of thought and can be studied. One can only control one’s own mental processes after carefully examining them.

A regular, unemotional baseline player is rarely a keen thinker. If he were, he would not adhere to the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is usually a pretty clear indicator of his/her type of mind. The stolid, easy-going player, who normally advocates the baseline game, does it because he does not want to activate up his/her slow mind to work out a reliably safe method of getting to the net.

However, then there is the other type of baseline player, who would prefer to stay at the rear of the court while supervising an attack intended to disrupt up your game. He is a very dangerous player and a deep, keen thinking antagonist. He gets his/her results by changing his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variety of his/her game. This player is a very good psychologist.

The first kind of tennis player mentioned above just hits the ball without much idea of what he is actually up to, while the latter always has a definite plan and adheres to it.

If you are a beginner tennis player or want to know more about the general psychology of tennis, please go to our website called Tennis Tips for Beginners This article, The General Psychology Of Tennis (Part 1) is released under a creative commons attribution licence.